Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Social Welfare and Pensions (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill. At the outset, I commend the Minister on bringing this Bill before the House. The Government received a mandate from the people in the general election of 2011 to fix a broken economy and to bring back Ireland's economic sovereignty. On assuming office, it rapidly became apparent that a tsunami of challenges and difficulties lay in store in the road ahead. However, the new Government has set about its task diligently and to date has made significant progress in re-orientating the economy back towards a more sustainable path.

One of the more challenging legacies left by the previous Administration for the present Government to tackle was the loss of more than 250,000 jobs in the economy during the preceding years. As a newly-elected Deputy after the 2011 general election, one of the toughest and most difficult positions in which I found myself was in my clinic at an office in Bandon, west Cork, while explaining to someone who had been self-employed that the person had no entitlement to supports as an automatic right. Many such self-employed people had come from the construction industry and had contributed enormous sums of money to the Exchequer during the so-called Celtic tiger era. However, Members of the newly-elected Government were faced with the task of telling them there was nothing they could do for them. They were not entitled to benefits because they had not paid the requisite PRSI contributions. What made such people particularly irate was looking around them, where they could see what appeared to them to be people who had never worked in or contributed anything to the economy but who were in a position to avail of the full suite of entitlements. As this irritant is hard to explain, I welcome the moves made by the Minister, in this Bill in particular, towards addressing the entitlements for those who are self-employed. It is long overdue, is a most welcome development and I look forward to further developments in this regard.

The overwhelming mandate given to the Government both requires it to regain Ireland's economic sovereignty and puts a huge demand on it to reform the State and how it is run. In recent months, I have had occasion to knock many doors in my constituency, in towns such as Bandon and Clonakilty in west Cork. When one converses with people, by and large most will accept there is tough medicine to be dished out. However, I have challenged myself repeatedly to try to narrow down to a single word what it is that people want of the Government. The question is what is it that one could write in a paragraph or sentence or could distil into a single word. On examination, however, the word one comes across on the doorsteps most often is fairness. People do not mind taking the medicine and do not mind contributing and helping the Government to get the country back on track but they want it to be done in fairness. If this is the case, they will put up with the sacrifice and be willing to assist the Government.

Regrettably, political opportunism arising from opposition politics, as well as cheap and crass media headlines, continually portray and project a sense of unfairness by trying to create illusory and false information to convince people that many of the measures are unfair and that fairness is not at the heart of the day-to-day running of this country. It is suggested the Government takes some form of perverse pleasure from protecting an elite group of rich people or from protecting bondholders, as though such individuals were voters who might re-elect Government Members. Through such political opportunism, people are made angry and as they hurt and take tough medicine, it is not helpful for the day-to-day living they must go through. To this end, I greatly welcome the steps taken in this Bill to prevent further fraud. Welfare fraud is a particular irritant for those who continually seek fairness. An example of this took place last week, as I knocked on doors in the Deerpark estate in Bandon, which is located in my constituency. Many of the people who live there are council tenants and were irate because they had experienced increases in the weekly rent they pay for their council houses of between €20 and €50 per week. These people had received leaflets from the local Sinn Féin party the previous weekend, advising that these rent increases were as a result of the Fine Gael-Labour Party property tax. To suggest that a €20 or €30 weekly increase, which would amount to an annual increase of between €1,000 and €1,500, was to cover the property tax clearly was disingenuous and deceitful. It was a lie. It simply compounded the anger and anxiety people feel in these difficult times.

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